Edge Clusters & CDN Layer (Provider Clustering)

Group nearby provider nodes into clusters (Edge PoPs) to:

  • Reduce RTT and egress costs for popular destinations.

  • Support content distribution (web, media, API, game patches).

  • Add resilience and horizontal scaling for high-demand locales.

Cluster Formation & Membership

  • Eligibility: Rep_i above threshold, stake ≥ minStake_cluster, region/ASN match.

  • Membership protocol: SWIM-style gossip (failure detection + membership) over QUIC control channel.

  • Shard & routing: Consistent hashing (e.g., rendezvous hashing) on content key {host, path, cache-key}.

  • Leader/Coordinator: RAFT-lite or epochal leader via VRF lottery (prevents sticky leaders).

  • Service ads: Cluster publishes SRV records to Intelligent DNS with health and capacity

CDN Data Plane

  • Cache tiers: L1 (RAM) on edge providers; L2 (NVMe) within cluster; optional L3 regional.

  • QUIC Anycast: announce shared VIP via anycast/GeoDNS; ECMP within cluster using 5-tuple hash.

  • Content addressing: origin fetch over QUIC; cache key = normalized URL + Vary headers + E2E policy.

  • Integrity: optional content signatures (origin-signed SHA-256) or Merkle chunk trees for multi-source fetch.

Control Plane & Cache Coordination

  • Directory service: gossip index of hot keys, frequency counts, and TTLs.

  • Prefetch: predictive fetch based on demand spikes (short-term EWMA, Holt-Winters).

  • Admission & eviction: ARC/LIRS with priority boost by Rep_i and regional hit ratio.

  • SLA policy: content owners may publish cache directives via signed manifests.

Security & Privacy

No payload inspection for private traffic. CDN applies only to opt-in content (public assets or owner-signed).

  • Encrypted transport: QUIC/TLS; optional object-level AEAD for CDN objects at rest.

  • Abuse control: per-AS/region rate caps; anomaly detection (synchronicity, cache-miss storms).

Cluster Incentives & Revenue Split

  • Route fees: per-hop share (already defined) for relay work.

  • CDN fees: request- and byte-priced; split by work share (serves, hit ratio, egress saved) and Rep_i multiplier.

  • Treasury: portion reserved for cold-start replication and cross-region seeding.

Cluster Selection & Anycast Flow

Cluster score for DNS

Sel_cluster = H( median(Rep_members), hit_ratio, avg_RTT, egress_savings, price )

where H is a normalized harmonic mean to avoid a single weak dimension dominating.

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